Me (casual user: hobby coding; amateur art; web; email; games; home finances; TB's of digital media): I backup weekly using Time Machine to a NAS disk I keep on our wireless network. Very Important files (like my personal finances and other important data) I encrypt and backup onto two thumbdrives: one on my keychain and one I keep at the office. (This data amounts to only a few hundred kB.) The digital media goes on to an external USB RAID array and really I don't care about losing most of it. The utmost favorite stuff is replicated on several drives, but can still probably be downloaded again if somehow it all gets lost.
My Wife (business user: business finances; customer communications; business docs; contact lists): Backs up only when I nag her into it, or do it for her, amounting to maybe twice a year and inevitably to a standalone USB portable hard drive using the built-in WinXP backup utility. When her PC crashes, or fails to boot, my first question is "When did you backup last?" -- this is always answered with "Whenever you did it last," and guess who gets stuck with trying to recover the data from her failed HD? The only restores that have ever worked for her have been me mounting the failed hard drive to an OS X machine and copying the pertinent data.
It really peeves me that the default backup options for WinXP SP2 are so fucking completely useless for restore as to be a total fucking waste of time.
Yes she needs a new computer, but no she claims she cannot afford one (despite me telling her that the cost of replacing her laptop before it fails is miniscule compared to the cost of replacing it after the old one fails and loses her data). I'm not buying her one because I need a new one myself but at least mine degrades gracefully. She's not a dummy, just a typical business user who has no interest in or time for thinking through the details and intricacies of data management, not to mention failure modes and recovery scenarios. For these kinds of people it needs to be made automatic, idiotproof, and restore robust. Not an easy task.
Lots of reasons. My wife has MS and to detect new lesions and determine the effectiveness of her treatments they submit her to a 3T MRI once or twice a year.
I can imagine quite a few other neurological or autoimmune disorders, not to mention cancer etc., that would have similar diagnostic requirements.
Well, on the bright side, there will be no more NIPES on the lunch menu.
I really hated the days they served NIPES in the cafeteria.
But then there was that one weird kid who *loved* the NIPES. If I got to him first, I could trade him my NIPES for his canned pears or a half pint of milk.
Moral of the story: If you're going use your phone to take photos of your naked self in the mirror, use your free hand to cover your face, not your junk.
Yes, this is my leading hypothesis, too... combined with a zero-tolerance hall monitor mentality, probably very like the one she encountered to begin with.
This is disturbing not necessarily because of the password coercion, but because of the entire premise. What are the school administrators, the parents, and the entire adult community *thinking* when they make such a big friggin deal about "I hate you" comments that are clearly just juvenile emoting? Why are they getting involved in such petty hall locker politics to begin with?
Did they never mature past a high school emotional age?
Were they itching to make an example of someone?
Do they have some policy or quota that they need to demonstrate compliance with?
In other words, it's just like when my wife flips out after I leave dirty socks on the floor. The socks aren't the real problem; something else is. She's been bottling it up, and the socks were just the trigger for some other pent up stress... it may or may not be something I did, but it certainly means there's something I need to fix. In the same sense, something else is going on in Minnewaska... something else that needs fixing. And it's not middle school drama.
I'd recommend anything you can find by Pohl. Especially The Starchild Trilogy. He's one of the masters of classic SF, and perhaps the least recognized.
Macroscope has been mentioned at least twice in comments here. I have to agree that its probably Anthony's best novel.
Other Piers Anthony standouts include the Omnivore / Orn / OX trilogy, and the Cluster series... at least the first three. And perhaps the Tarot trilogy. Anything published after those I couldn't recommend.
And I was just reading the other day also about the rampant illiteracy and innumeracy in today's society.
It really makes me wonder if we shouldn't establish some sort of prerequisite for voting. Say a College Diploma or 4 years of military service. Two tracks.
Heinlein took all kind of shit for proposing something similar in Starship Troopers, even being called a fascist. At the time, I didn't really appreciate the idea fully, either. But now I can see that if you had served in WWII, anything smacking of fascism would never have been voted for in the US.
Nowadays... not so much. This kind of enfranchisement prerequisite can't have a worse effect than handing down decisions like "unlimited political contributions are free speech that may not be abridged."
Because, you know, seeing too many pornos starring well hung dudes banging skinny skanks with big teets gives young men the wrong ideas about body image, too.
Makes about as little sense as the OP's proposal.
Here's an idea. Instead of *banning* certain forms of expression and restricting the speech of the fashion industry, why don't these public health scientists exercise their free speech. Done creatively, they could use dark comedy, satire and ridicule to point out how downright freaky these anorexic models really are... break a few rules and they could even create enough buzz to get peoples' attention.
- Show a bulemic model excuse herself after a meal to go throw up, then return to the table and give a deep tongue kiss to her date, who shows a visible reaction to the taste. - Show an anorexic model's view of herself in the mirror as a normal person, then zoom out to show she's really a bag of antlers. Use a digital overdub of a real concentration camp victim. - Show a train of size zero models walking down the runway, overdubbed by a horse race announcer type... then one trips and breaks her femur in three places as the announcer verbally cringes and says, "ooh, that one's gonna have to be put down. What a shame..."
See... if I can do it, and I'm just a friggin' engineer, then it's not that hard.
OK - actually I've seen that. I've enjoyed visiting the Oregon Coast several times.
I knew there was probably a good reason, but was thinking more along the lines that it was just where the founders lived. Maybe my subconscious remembered the air museum but I ignored it in favor of making a methane and beer joke.
Why here? They do have a lot of cheese, a lot of cows... and therefore a lot of methane. And the whole NW corner of OR has a lot of liberals and a lot of microbrew... which renders into even more gas.
No shit? Beloved character reduced to shill by Hollywood?? You don't say? That really would be news. NOT.
With Half-truths
[clutches heart] Ohmygod. I'm going to faint. Advertisers stretching the truth to market their product. The horror! [beat] This is news?
About Conservation
[pause]
[pause]
I see what you did there.
Tell me, if Mr. Lorax had been shanghai'ed into being a spokesman for toothpaste, toys, or floor wax, would this be a story? No. This story just fans the flames of the culture wars. Whoever started this meme knew that the word "Conservation" and the phrase "liberal propaganda" would propagate the meme with his target audience, who likes to get all a-quiver and indignant and victimized when mass media propagate memes they disagree with.
He's contributed to some of the best free games available, nethack and Battle for Wesnoth.
Nethack needs no further comment. The dev team thinks of everything.
Battle for Wesnoth is, despite the anime-ish art, one of the best turn-based strategy games available... free or not free.
And then there's Super Star Trek. That game alone is responsible for changing me from a bored 7th grader in 1979 with too much free time for my own good into a focused geek with a clear direction and, ultimately, a 30 year career in engineering.
The difference is, like typical psychopathic corporate entities, they think it's all theirs. Nothing about the way 'our' was used in that letter excludes the MPAA/RIAA members from participating as citizen users, equals among equals. The "them" in the implied us/them distinction are those who would legislate DRM and censorship on software, media, devices and the infrastructure of the net.
The answer to the question "Who believes UN governance will result in improvement?" will give a lot of insight into the motives behind transferring control to a UN agency. My immediate suspicions include: the copyright cartels, repressive governments, and telecoms/tier 1's seeking to create international monopolies.
Sure there are technical improvements that arguably can be made at various layers, but does anyone think that the UN can or will do any better at managing them than the current system?
Slashdot Mirror
Me (casual user: hobby coding; amateur art; web; email; games; home finances; TB's of digital media): I backup weekly using Time Machine to a NAS disk I keep on our wireless network. Very Important files (like my personal finances and other important data) I encrypt and backup onto two thumbdrives: one on my keychain and one I keep at the office. (This data amounts to only a few hundred kB.) The digital media goes on to an external USB RAID array and really I don't care about losing most of it. The utmost favorite stuff is replicated on several drives, but can still probably be downloaded again if somehow it all gets lost.
My Wife (business user: business finances; customer communications; business docs; contact lists): Backs up only when I nag her into it, or do it for her, amounting to maybe twice a year and inevitably to a standalone USB portable hard drive using the built-in WinXP backup utility. When her PC crashes, or fails to boot, my first question is "When did you backup last?" -- this is always answered with "Whenever you did it last," and guess who gets stuck with trying to recover the data from her failed HD? The only restores that have ever worked for her have been me mounting the failed hard drive to an OS X machine and copying the pertinent data.
It really peeves me that the default backup options for WinXP SP2 are so fucking completely useless for restore as to be a total fucking waste of time.
Yes she needs a new computer, but no she claims she cannot afford one (despite me telling her that the cost of replacing her laptop before it fails is miniscule compared to the cost of replacing it after the old one fails and loses her data). I'm not buying her one because I need a new one myself but at least mine degrades gracefully. She's not a dummy, just a typical business user who has no interest in or time for thinking through the details and intricacies of data management, not to mention failure modes and recovery scenarios. For these kinds of people it needs to be made automatic, idiotproof, and restore robust. Not an easy task.
I dunno why, but I found this comment immensely funny. (Score:+1, non sequitur )
Can I implant one of these tattoos in my arm and a permanent magnet on my waist and then generate current when I swing my arms?
Interesting possibilities...
That's what she said.
After visiting the free clinic.
Am I the only one to immediately think of how to apply rule 34 to it?
No. But don't forget that getting such a tattoo would require the repeated and numerous insertion of a needle into your genitals.
Lots of reasons. My wife has MS and to detect new lesions and determine the effectiveness of her treatments they submit her to a 3T MRI once or twice a year.
I can imagine quite a few other neurological or autoimmune disorders, not to mention cancer etc., that would have similar diagnostic requirements.
Well, on the bright side, there will be no more NIPES on the lunch menu.
I really hated the days they served NIPES in the cafeteria.
But then there was that one weird kid who *loved* the NIPES. If I got to him first, I could trade him my NIPES for his canned pears or a half pint of milk.
Moral of the story: If you're going use your phone to take photos of your naked self in the mirror, use your free hand to cover your face, not your junk.
Yes, this is my leading hypothesis, too... combined with a zero-tolerance hall monitor mentality, probably very like the one she encountered to begin with.
This is disturbing not necessarily because of the password coercion, but because of the entire premise. What are the school administrators, the parents, and the entire adult community *thinking* when they make such a big friggin deal about "I hate you" comments that are clearly just juvenile emoting? Why are they getting involved in such petty hall locker politics to begin with?
Did they never mature past a high school emotional age?
Were they itching to make an example of someone?
Do they have some policy or quota that they need to demonstrate compliance with?
In other words, it's just like when my wife flips out after I leave dirty socks on the floor. The socks aren't the real problem; something else is. She's been bottling it up, and the socks were just the trigger for some other pent up stress... it may or may not be something I did, but it certainly means there's something I need to fix. In the same sense, something else is going on in Minnewaska... something else that needs fixing. And it's not middle school drama.
I'd recommend anything you can find by Pohl. Especially The Starchild Trilogy. He's one of the masters of classic SF, and perhaps the least recognized.
Macroscope has been mentioned at least twice in comments here. I have to agree that its probably Anthony's best novel.
Other Piers Anthony standouts include the Omnivore / Orn / OX trilogy, and the Cluster series... at least the first three. And perhaps the Tarot trilogy. Anything published after those I couldn't recommend.
And I was just reading the other day also about the rampant illiteracy and innumeracy in today's society.
It really makes me wonder if we shouldn't establish some sort of prerequisite for voting. Say a College Diploma or 4 years of military service. Two tracks.
Heinlein took all kind of shit for proposing something similar in Starship Troopers, even being called a fascist. At the time, I didn't really appreciate the idea fully, either. But now I can see that if you had served in WWII, anything smacking of fascism would never have been voted for in the US.
Nowadays... not so much. This kind of enfranchisement prerequisite can't have a worse effect than handing down decisions like "unlimited political contributions are free speech that may not be abridged."
Because, you know, seeing too many pornos starring well hung dudes banging skinny skanks with big teets gives young men the wrong ideas about body image, too.
Makes about as little sense as the OP's proposal.
Here's an idea. Instead of *banning* certain forms of expression and restricting the speech of the fashion industry, why don't these public health scientists exercise their free speech. Done creatively, they could use dark comedy, satire and ridicule to point out how downright freaky these anorexic models really are... break a few rules and they could even create enough buzz to get peoples' attention.
- Show a bulemic model excuse herself after a meal to go throw up, then return to the table and give a deep tongue kiss to her date, who shows a visible reaction to the taste.
- Show an anorexic model's view of herself in the mirror as a normal person, then zoom out to show she's really a bag of antlers. Use a digital overdub of a real concentration camp victim.
- Show a train of size zero models walking down the runway, overdubbed by a horse race announcer type... then one trips and breaks her femur in three places as the announcer verbally cringes and says, "ooh, that one's gonna have to be put down. What a shame..."
See... if I can do it, and I'm just a friggin' engineer, then it's not that hard.
The inferred message here is that the RIAA (and presumably the MPAA, et al) will continue to try to pass this crap.
I have an inferred message right back (holds up a single finger).
In the wake of ESR's open letter to Chris Dodd, do I really need to remind you:
[D]on't screw with the Internet. Because it will screw you right back.
??
OK - actually I've seen that. I've enjoyed visiting the Oregon Coast several times.
I knew there was probably a good reason, but was thinking more along the lines that it was just where the founders lived. Maybe my subconscious remembered the air museum but I ignored it in favor of making a methane and beer joke.
Yes, Tillamook OR as in Tillamook Cheddar.
Why here? They do have a lot of cheese, a lot of cows... and therefore a lot of methane. And the whole NW corner of OR has a lot of liberals and a lot of microbrew... which renders into even more gas.
Is there some connection?
And my lawn...
I am really not certain at all whether there's a misspelling in your post or not...
Advertisers Co-opting The Lorax
No shit? Beloved character reduced to shill by Hollywood?? You don't say? That really would be news. NOT.
With Half-truths
[clutches heart] Ohmygod. I'm going to faint. Advertisers stretching the truth to market their product. The horror! [beat] This is news?
About Conservation
[pause]
[pause]
I see what you did there.
Tell me, if Mr. Lorax had been shanghai'ed into being a spokesman for toothpaste, toys, or floor wax, would this be a story? No. This story just fans the flames of the culture wars. Whoever started this meme knew that the word "Conservation" and the phrase "liberal propaganda" would propagate the meme with his target audience, who likes to get all a-quiver and indignant and victimized when mass media propagate memes they disagree with.
He's contributed to some of the best free games available, nethack and Battle for Wesnoth.
Nethack needs no further comment. The dev team thinks of everything.
Battle for Wesnoth is, despite the anime-ish art, one of the best turn-based strategy games available... free or not free.
And then there's Super Star Trek. That game alone is responsible for changing me from a bored 7th grader in 1979 with too much free time for my own good into a focused geek with a clear direction and, ultimately, a 30 year career in engineering.
There are several epic quotes from that letter, but the one I want on a tee shirt is,
Don’t screw with the Internet, because it will screw you right back.
The difference is, like typical psychopathic corporate entities, they think it's all theirs. Nothing about the way 'our' was used in that letter excludes the MPAA/RIAA members from participating as citizen users, equals among equals. The "them" in the implied us/them distinction are those who would legislate DRM and censorship on software, media, devices and the infrastructure of the net.
My first reaction was "wow, ESR writes better than most engineers I've come across." Very well penned, sir.
Also,
Don’t screw with the Internet. Because it will screw you right back.
is destined to become a battlecry...
The answer to the question "Who believes UN governance will result in improvement?" will give a lot of insight into the motives behind transferring control to a UN agency. My immediate suspicions include: the copyright cartels, repressive governments, and telecoms/tier 1's seeking to create international monopolies.
Sure there are technical improvements that arguably can be made at various layers, but does anyone think that the UN can or will do any better at managing them than the current system?